The Committee of Public Safety

Horst Rittel, in inventing the “wicked problem“, described it as having ten characteristics:

1. There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem.
2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
3. Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but better or worse.
4. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.
5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a “one-shot operation”; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts significantly.
6. Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan.
7. Every wicked problem is essentially unique.
8. Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.
9. The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem’s resolution.
10. The planner has no right to be wrong (planners are liable for the consequences of the actions they generate).

The explanation offered by the TRADOC pamphlet Commander’s Appreciation and Campaign Design is in the spirit of Herr Rittel but passes it through the cold, clammy grip of the color sucking vampires of DoD terminology (e.g. the rather colorful and memorable phrase “wicked problem” becomes the rather limp “ill-structured problem”):

1. There is no definitive way to formulate an ill-structured problem.
2. We cannot understand an ill-structured problem without proposing a solution.
3. Every ill-structured problem is essentially unique and novel.
4. Ill-structured problems have no fixed set of potential solutions.
5. Solutions to ill-structured problems are better-or-worse, not right-or-wrong.
6. Ill-structured problems are interactively complex.
7. Every solution to an ill-structured problem is a ‘one-shot operation.’
8. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to an ill-structured problem.
9. Ill-structured problems have no ‘stopping rule’.
10. Every ill-structured problem is a symptom of another problem.
11. The problem-solver has no right to be wrong.

Jeff Conklin narrowed this down to six characteristics:

1. The problem is not understood until after the formulation of a solution.
2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
3. Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong.
4. Every wicked problem is essentially novel and unique.
5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a ‘one shot operation’
6. Wicked problems have no given alternative solutions.

CACD provides this helpful breakdown on how dealing with the wicked problem differs from more righteous problems:

Well-Structured “Puzzle”

• Problem Structuring: The problem is self- evident. Structuring is trivial.
• Solution Development: There is only one right solution. It may be difficult to find.
• Execution of Solution: Success requires learning to perfect technique.
• Adaptive Iteration: No adaptive iteration required.

Medium-Structured “Structurally Complex Problem”

• Problem Structuring: Professionals easily agree on its structure.
• Solution Development: There may be more than one “right” answer. Professionals may disagree on the best solution. Desired end state can be agreed.
• Execution of Solution: Success requires learning to perfect technique and adjust solution.
• Adaptive Iteration: Adaptive iteration is required to find the best solution.

Ill-Structured “Wicked Problem”

• Problem Structuring: Professionals will have difficulty agreeing on problem structure and will have to agree on a shared starting hypothesis.
• Solution Development: Professionals will disagree on:
  • How the problem can be solved.
  • The most desirable end state.
  • Whether it can be attained.
• Execution of Solution: Success requires learning to perfect technique, adjust solution, and refine problem framing.
• Adaptive Iteration: Adaptive iteration is required both to refine problem structure and to find the best solution.

Conventional human problem solving breaks down when confronted by the wicked problem. Humans usually throw two problem solving approaches at problems. One uses the Automatic System and the other uses the Reflective System. Thaler and Sunstein comment in Nudge:

The Automatic System is rapid and is or feels instinctive, and it does not involve what we usually associate with the word thinking. When you duck because a ball is thrown at you unexpectedly, or get nervous when your airplane hits turbulence, or smile when you see a cute puppy, you are using your Automatic System. Brain scientists are able to say that the activities of the Automatic System are associated with the oldest parts of the brain, the parts we share with lizards (as well as puppies).

The Reflective System is more deliberate and self-conscious. We use the Reflective System when we are asked, “How much is 411 times 37?” Most people are also likely to use the Reflective System when deciding which route to take for a trip and whether to go to law school or business school. When we are writing this book we are (mostly) using our Reflective Systems, but sometimes ideas pop into our heads when we are in the shower or taking a walk and not thinking at all about the book, and these probably are coming from our Automatic Systems.

The Automatic System is what we in software engineering call legacy software. It’s the results of solutions to obvious problems that were so obvious that evolution hardwired them into our brains over eons. Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s illustration of a “well-structured” problem is what happens when you see a leopard. Your Automatic System has arrived at the one clear solution: run away as fast as possible (a good option if, as this guy postulates, early humans could run as fast as 37 mph). The Automatic System is fast while the Reflective System is somewhat slower. The Reflective System is geared to the CACD’s Medium Structured “Structurally Complex Problem”. It’s good at problems where the desired endstate is clear but there’s more than one way to get there. Wicked problems, however, are too complex for Automatic responses and strain Reflective responses. A good working definition for a wicked problem is any problem that falls into the gap between evolved and Automatic responses that Reflective calculations haven’t filled.

It seems that wicked problems will only succumb to distributed problem solving where many heads are knocked together and thrown at the problem. This creates multiple lines of approach that crush the wicked problem between converging columns of adaption. Some would identify this happenstance with the phenomenon known as crowdsourcing but that’s a misreading. Most of the great paradigm shifts come from a few aggregating minds but as much of 90% of the upfront processing will be done by lesser minds with varying degrees of ability and effort. At the end, a few super aggregators will step in and finish the final formulation. At that the multitudes can look back and see that they had been whittling away at a giant problem that they didn’t even known was there. The solution to wicked problems is culture, a form of Lamarckian natural selection where attributes acquired in life can be passed on to others without transfer through direct biological interface (though that’s a matter of choice).

The question that we face is how best to conduct the concentric cultural attacks on the looming wicked problems we confront on personal, group, national, and world levels. Any such detached question is complicated by the problem that any solution to a wicked problem has political implications, meaning that it will shift power from one party to others. The airy detachment of pure intellectual debate will inevitably be befouled by appeals to the Automatic System since triggering Automatic responses is a cheap, powerful, and time-tested method for achieving power. However, political infighting, whether expressed as logrolling, politicking, or outright war, may only tangentially contribute towards solving the wicked problem in the most tangential way: by creating an even worse wicked problem than the existing wicked problem. Techniques of dialogue have changed little since the dawn of time. If rhetoric and precision guided munitions have more conversational impact than war cries and spears, it’s more of a change in quantity than quality. Violence and sophistry are part of the wicked problem’s definition and its eventual solution. However, their underbrush must be cleared to get at the wicked problem, especially if, as I’d argue, solving the wicked problem is primarily a distributed effort. As a communication problem, noise imposed by sender, recipient, and medium must be minimized as much as possible to enable clarity.

Rittel’s own solution to defeating the wicked problem was IBIS, the Issue-Based Information System. IBIS involves at minimum four elements:

• Questions
• Ideas
• Pros
• Cons

An IBIS map starts with a root question:

Root Question

A question can only be responded to with another question or with an idea. An idea is best seen as first a potential answer to the question and secondly a chance to evolve into further questions:

Questions and Answers

Pros and cons can only respond to ideas. Further questions can also respond to ideas:

Questions, Answers, Pros, and Cons

Following those few principles, Rittel argued, even wicked problems could be mapped. A shared map would be capable of establishing a shared understanding, enabling distributed problem solving to begin. Actually doing the IBIS mapping requires skill; as the old Othello commercial said, it takes a minute to learn and a lifetime to master. There’s several approaches to utilizing IBIS for creating shared understanding. Rittel’s original version used pencil and paper, relics of the 1970s. Nowadays you can use Compendium, a free open source (LGPL) IBIS mapping tool in conjunction with techniques like dialogue mapping or argument mapping. Less structured approaches can be taken with techniques like mindmapping using free tools like Freemind or XMind or concept mapping using tools like Cmap or VUE. More structured approaches also exist but too much representational granularity leads inevitably to uses of words like ontology. IBIS is a nice balance between too little structure and too much.

How do you extend such an approach over a sufficient distribution space to generate solutions for wicked problems? That’s a question for another time.

Yesterday marked 1 year since this blog was first inflicted on the world.

• Isegoria links to this post on how many nuclear bombs it would take to destroy the world. An illustration:

How many nukes does it take to destroy the world?

• Classic crank Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes to Tory leader David Cameron on how to make a black swan safe world. You can hear Taleb gesticulating wildly as he writes:
  

  The solution is obvious: build an economy that increases the role of well-tested traditions. Ban financial derivatives that require advanced mathematics rather than trial and error. Look at mother nature. There is a complex system built around sound principles that has insured both evolution and survival. It does not let anything get too big to fail. It breaks things early. I don’t understand why people who stand against tampering with nature accept tampering with the economy that would have organically grown too. Work on building a “robust” society, capable of withstanding errors, in which the role of finance (hence debt) would be minimal. We want a society in which people can make mistakes without risk of total collapse. Silicon Valley offers a good example, where people have the chance to fail fast (and repeatedly).

  The best blueprint is the very opposite of the Obama administration’s economic policies (its foreign policy is commendable). It has been administering pain-killers without addressing the cause of disease. Obama is strengthening those who do the wrong thing. Take the “cash for clunkers” programme. It is a handout to those who bought the wrong – uneconomic – car. He is penalising people who did not make a mistake. The same applies to other “rescues”. By raising taxes after the crisis, the administration is hampering evolution. Those who do well in difficult times end up paying more tax and those who lost money in the crisis pay less. The rich who got us here are being rescued by regular Joes and being subsidised by the tax system.

Where's the beef?

There is an ongoing tug of war in the U.S. Armed Forces between two factions that military commentator Andrew Bacevich has labeled the Crusaders and the Conservatives. The Crusaders, Bacevich argues, claim that “failed states” create the conditions for terrorism, drug trafficking, and other instability that threatens the United States. The United States must intervene to stabilize these failed states, suppressing active agents of instability using counterinsurgency (COIN) tactics, and rebuilding the broken state and social institutions of those failed states to prevent future instability. The Crusaders, Bacevich asserts, want to institutionalize COIN in the U.S. Armed Forces, arguing that that the wars the United States is likely to find itself in during the immediate future will be COIN-intensive wars similar to the current American interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Conservatives, according to Bacevich, want to retain the edge in conventional combat that the U.S. military developed in the aftermath of the American intervention in Vietnam. Conservatives advocate a less interventionist foreign policy, focusing on threats that actively threaten the core interests of the United States. They argue that intervening in every failed state wastes American resources and distracts from bigger threats.

The Beef Bites Back

One operational technique that might bridge the two warring camps is the razzia. A razzia is a raid involving division-sized ground units. Units would move into a failed state, crush all active resistance, destroy military and dual-use infrastructure, and withdraw. Razzias into a failed state would be frequent, perhaps on an annual basis, but usually on an as needed basis. A razzia would have more destructive conventional power than an air raid, a missile strike, or a special operations raid. However, it wouldn’t expose the military to the cost, rigors, and need to train for COIN. Conventional fighting tactics would be emphasized while dispiriting, manpower intensive COIN would be avoided.

The strategic effect would be creating areas of denial. While whole regions would lake state institutions, their use would be denied to anyone who wished to use it as a base for terrorism and other kinds of war. Any significant attempts to create a base for terrorism would prompt another razzia. Attrition through firepower would replace attrition through occupation. Lodgements ashore, usually islands or ports, would be seized and used as basing areas. The local population would be expelled. Razzias would be launched from these lodgements as needed.

The chances of this being adopted, however, by any American government, is just about nil. But if someone decided to launch a razzia, I have a recommended target:

Tomax and Xamot Keno

Taxonomy of Deception

Barton Whaley and J. Bowyer Bell discovered they had a shared interest in deception during the 1970s. They tried to drum up support for deception studies in academia and government. However, for some reason, they found few takers for their line of investigation. Even politicians and the military, two logical constituencies for deception studies, declined to fund Whaley and Bell’s exposition of their own black arts. In the early eighties, there was an oasis in the desert. Whaley and Bell found a publisher for a book on deception studies. However, it had to be aimed at a popular market. The result was Cheating and Deception.

Cheating and Deception discusses many manifestations of deception in everyday human life. There are extensive discussions of the practice of deception in magic, war, gambling, sports, business, science, and art among others. However, Whaley and Bell get in their theory of deception as well, expanding upon it in Chapter 2 The Structure of Deceit: A Theory of Cheating.  Their theory of deception, they claim, is the only general theory of cheating that has been developed. Anyone who’s seen Whaley’s massive bibliography of deception should be convinced that if there was another general theory of deception, Whaley would have found it. Here is the details on Whaley and Bell’s theory of deception:

Essentially, cheating, or deception is the advantageous distortion of perceived reality, The advantage falls to the cheater because the cheated person mispercieves what is assumed to the the real world.

There are two kinds of deception: physical deception, the various adaptations nature has evolved to protect various species, and psychological deception, the manipulation of human perception. Both are characterized by:

Two broad categories in the structure of deceit, hiding the real and showing the false. The second category cannot exist without the first, for all deception and cheating involves hiding. Level one deception, hiding, is itself divided into three distinct parts: masking, repackaging, and dazzling. Level-two deception, showing, also has three parts: mimicking, inventing, and decoying…

The basic purpose of hiding is to screen or cloak a person, place, thing, direction, or time by a variety of means that range from the simple to the complex. These combined means hide by producing a cover. The basic purpose of showing is consciously to display the false which, perforce, must hide the real. In showing, the end result is to create an EFFECT, an illusion of the false as real. All SHOWING involves hiding, but HIDING almost never involves showing.

The following table is helpful:

While there are only six kinds of cheating there is only one way to cheat. To cheat, one chooses from one or more of the six categories one or more CHARACTERISTICS and fashions this into a RUSE that creates an ILLUSION of either COVER or EFFECT.

The role of the ruse is key:

The RUSE is the process of choosing first the appropriate category, such as dazzling or mimicking, and then the necessary number of characteristics to create either a COVER or and EFFECT…There is an endless number of possible RUSES, just as one can consider an almost endless number of characteristics (going down, if need be, to the level of subatomic particles) but each must be fashioned by the planner from one or more varieties of the six categories of cheating…RUSES, whether used to COVER or EFFECT, themselves tend to fall into five categories:

• UNNOTICED
• BENIGN
• DESIRABLE
• UNAPPEALING
• DANGEROUS

In all five categories the RUSE fashioned by the planner creates a COVER or an EFFECT for the potential victim who, it is hoped, will accept the ILLUSION.

The illusion is where the ruse is tested in reality:

Once the appropriate category or categories has been selected by the planner, the necessary characteristics fashioned into a RUSE for one of the five basic purposes, either a COVER or an EFFECT—both illusory—exists. This is the crucial moment for the planner, for his opponents must accept the ILLUSION if he is to be cheated or deceived…the crux of the matter is whether the EFFECT or COVER will create an effective ILLUSION.

Bell and Whaley provide this diagram of the cheating process:

All cheating follows a Deception Planning Loop (reminiscent of the OODA loop):

Deception Planning Loop

The Loop is only half as complex as it, appears, since the analysis and design halves are mirror images of each other. The entire cheating process can be presented as a simple linear sequence from the senior commander’s strategic goal to the deception planner’s goal. The general wants to surprise the enemy and win the battle as part of a grand strategy to achieve total victory. To do so he resorts to a deception stratagem…If the enemy accepts the illusion then the general’s deception goal contributed to his strategic goal, winning. With rare exceptions successful deception requires a goal beyond deceit alone. Few cheat solely for the pleasure of so doing but in pursuit of some goal, and this is particularly true of military matters. Generally, cheating is a purposeful human activity that contributes to a greater ambition. And the process always follows the Deception Planning Loop defined by category, fashioning a RUSE from characteristics that are projected by selected CHANNEL as an EFFECT or COVER that, if successful, creates an ILLUSION made up of the perceived characteristics that is, therefore, a successful STRATAGEM supporting the Deception Goal and hence the Strategic Goal. Every time.

The Flow of Deceit

Strategy

America is one of two nations that can destroy civilization with its substantial nuclear arsenal. America has the world’s most powerful air force and navy. It has the army with the greatest arsenal of firepower. America is the only political community that can project power anywhere in the world. America dominates the Global Commons, sea, air, and space. America accounts for a fourth of global economic activity. It has a population of 300 million.

If you wanted to contain this colossus, how would you do it?

One strategy of containment is a variant of one the Soviet Union may have only semi-consciously followed. This strategy involves:

1. Spreading infantry weapons and light explosives into every corner of the globe.
2. Spreading training on how to use the weapons with basic infantry tactics.

This strategy has the following goals:

1. Make intervention in any area sufficiently painful that it deters the United States, with its low threshold for pain, from intervening.
2. If the United States does intervene, make the process as painful as possible and extract the maximum blood price in order to reinforce the historical low threshold.
3. Make the ability to resist sufficiently high to deter the United States with its low pain threshold but sufficiently low that a power following Hama rules can overcome it if they so choose. A nation who can cross the brutality threshold at will, something the United States cannot sustain, will have an advantage.
4. Be low cost.
5. Avoid direct confrontation with the United States.
6. Hedge in the United States until its internal contradictions topple it from its position.

Wheel of Time

The life and death of civilizations has been the subject of song and story since the beginning of history. The ancients thought the passage of time was cyclical: the ages of the Earth repeated over and over. Everything was doomed to repeat again and again and again. The destiny of man was bound to a constant cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.

Western culture begins with a faint remembrance of a fallen civilization. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey retell the culminating moment of a lost heroic age. The classical Greeks were aware that they lived amongst the ruins of faded glory. The world had descended from a Golden Age through a Silver Age and a Bronze Age to the current Iron Age. Whether the high Mycenaean Age was all that grand or not was irrelevant: it was much better than the long and deep Dark Age that followed.

In this spirit, Plato, Aristotle, and, most prominently, Polybius developed the theory of anacyclosis, the cycle of government. Polybius’s version of the cycle followed this pattern:

1. Monarchy – tribal rule based on brute force
2. Kingship – virtuous rule by one man
3. Tyranny – wicked rule by one man
4. Aristocracy – virtuous rule by a few men
5. Oligarchy – wicked rule by a few men
6. Democracy – virtuous rule by the many
7. Ochlocracy – wicked rule by the many (mob rule)

Ochlocracy would eventually elevate one man to power and the cycle would repeat itself. Niccolo Machiavelli picks up this theme in Book III of his Discourses on Livy. He argues that a political community only renews itself either through external accident or internal prudence. Either of these function as a wake up call and restore a political community’s connection with reality. Truth will break out all over.

John Boyd’s OODA Loop demonstrates the machinery of adaption.

OODA Loop

The world is observed. This observation is then fed through a process of analysis and deduction where the observation is torn down into its essential bits and then reassembled into a new compressed orientation through a process of synthesis and induction. This orientation is a prediction about what the next observation will be. In order to test how accurate its prediction is and verify how well its compressed form represents the outside world, the orientation either acted upon directly or submitted to an inner judge for further deliberation. This inner judge examines the compression according to its internal standards and either acts upon it, sends it back for further orientation, or discards it. If decision acts upon the orientation, it subjects it to the unfolding environment through action. The effect of the action is then observed and the process repeats itself.

If the process of orientation compresses the outside world with great fidelity, capturing all the important bits of reality, and leads to action that successfully copes with the unfolding environment, than an OODA loop is healthy. If its compression of the outside world is faulty, leaving out essential details, and leads to action that fails to cope with the demands of the unfolding environment, than an OODA loop is unhealthy. Healthy OODA loops lead to a healthy adaptive system, leaving it capable of surviving and even flourishing. Unhealthy OODA loops lead to a maladaptive system which may not even be able to summon the power to survive.

The OODA loop of a political community functions on five levels.

Scale of War

1. Culture: divides priority between desires.
2. Politics: divides power between desires.
3. Strategy: reconciles power and desire.
4. Operational Art: arranges power and desire in time and space.
5. Tactics: controls the interaction of power and desire with external forces.

Each of these is a OODA loop running independently of the others. Each runs at its own rate. Each may reach conclusions that differ from other levels. Each feeds higher levels. The highest level, culture, runs at a pace slower than the last level, tactics. Tactics is in direct contact with the unfolding environment while culture is insulated from the outside by several levels. All levels must ultimately answer to the dictates of the outside environment but they also have the ability to push back. Pushing back, if successful, will adapt the unfolding environment to the orientation of the inner OODA loops.

Most of the processes of the OODA loops are devoted to optimizing and working out the kinks of an existing orientation. However, periodically, the state of the unfolding environment triggers a complete destruction of the previous orientation. If the adaptive system does not adapt to the new state, it will almost inevitably perish. Such a transformative change can be gradual or catastrophic. An orientation may suffer from the slow accumulation of discrepancies between it and the outside world or it may be atomized by one gigantic black swan. Whether it’s the culmination of a thousand cuts or one gigantic blow, the end result is a paradigm shift. The environment changes utterly and the orientation must follow suite or bad things will happen.

The shift depends upon the orientation

The problem that any political community faces is that its OODA loop is the sum of five OODA loops, each running at different speeds, each producing different orientations, and each focused on a specialized role that leads to periodic clashes with other OODA loops. This means that while the orientation produced by an OODA loop at one level may successfully adapt to the dikat of the unfolding environment, other levels orientations may lag in adaptability or even fail to adapt. This means that the system as a whole has, at best, a mixed adaption to the unfolding environment or, at worst, a fatally flawed orientation. It is distinctly possible, for example, for cultural orientation to lag tactical orientation by centuries or even millennia. If there’s a decent margin of safety, this may not matter. If not, bad things are happening.

Political communities have problems. Most of their institutions start out as instruments dedicated to accomplishing a certain desire. They are based on a clear conception of their role and a clean definition of their purpose. However, over time this original clarity diminishes. The environment the institution was originally designed for changes. The members of the institution spend their time preparing to fight the last war and optimize the institution for its original mission even if the world has changed in such a way that that mission is unrealizable. Even worse, the institution becomes dedicated to a secondary objective: the protection of the power allocated to it to perform its mission. This deflects the institution from its original goal and shifts it to the game of fishing for sinecures. Over time, this clogs the orientation of a political community’s OODA loop and makes the already large problem of five way adaption even more problematic. Power is drained into institutions that don’t forward the overall adaptation of the community. This tends to lead to the equivalent of a paradigm shift for political communities: revolution.

Adaptation within a political community may come as a result of external shock or internal prudence as Machiavelli pointed out. It may be that most adaption is internal prudence, the optimization of an orientation within a paradigm and the external shock is what delivers the paradigm shift, triggering the need for mass adaptation. While sometimes adaptation to an external crisis is successfully accomplished by the same actors that were present at its inception, usually a change in orientation is proceeded by a change in who’s warming the chairs. This is Pareto’s “circulation of the elite” since it is the elite of a political community that largely drives a community’s incremental adaptation through internal prudence and it is a rotation of elites that usually drives a community’s large scale adaption to external shock. James Burnham covered this in the thirteenth Machiavellian principle:

13. There occur periodically very rapid shifts in the composition and structure of elites: that is, social revolution.

From a Machiavellian point of view, a social revolution means a comparatively rapid shift in the composition and structure the elite and in the mode of its relation to the non-elite. It is possible to state the conditions under which such a shift takes place. The principal of these conditions are the following:

1. When the institutional structure, and the elite which has the ruling position within this structure, are unable to handle possibilities opened up by technological advances and by the growth, for whatever reason, of new social forces.
2. When a considerable percentage of the ruling class devotes little attention to the business of ruling, and turns its interests to such fields as culture, art, philosophy and the pursuit of sensuous pleasure.
3. When an elite is unable or unwilling to assimilate rising new elements from the masses or from its own lower ranks.
4. When large sections of the elite lose confidence in themselves and the legitimacy of their own rule; and when in both elite and non-elite there is a loss of faith in the political formulas and myths that have held the social structure together.
5. When the ruling class, or much of it, is unable or unwilling to use force in a firm and determined way, and instead tries to rely almost exclusively on manipulation, compromise, deceit, and fraud.

The elite and those rising into the elite from the non-elite constitute the essential mechanisms of a political community’s OODA loop. If the elite are responsive to the unfolding environment, then the opposite, Burnham argues, is the likely state of affairs:

If, in the selection of members of the elite, there existed a condition of perfect free competition, so that each individual could, without any obstacle, rise just as high in the social scale as his talents and ambition permitted, the elite could be presumed to include, at every moment and in the right order, just those persons best fitted for membership in it. Under such circumstances—which Pareto seems to imagine after the analogy of the theoretical free market of classical economics, or the biological arena of the struggle for survival—society would remain dynamic and strong, automatically correcting its own weaknesses.

If they, for the reasons Burnham outlines, are no longer reading the unfolding environment correctly, than they are maladaptive. It may require an external shock on a dramatic scale to bring a political community back into correct alignment with outside reality. Unfortunately, the the external shock may be so violent that it destroys the political community altogether. The story of the birth and death of civilizations is more often than not the story of the death of civilization. For a political community to maintain institutional continuity and coherence over even a few millennia like the Papacy or China is a minor miracle. Even the first cultural achievements of the West, the works of Homer, are sad songs of civilization passed thence.

America, watch your back.

Identity at work.

Adam Elkus makes a few interesting observations on Zenpundit’s Kilcullen Doctrine post. These inspired a few thoughts:

What we as Americans excel at are technical solutions and innovations. Modern counterinsurgency doctrine is an brilliant technocratic solution…Modern counterinsurgency was instrumentalized as a solution to irregular conflict, drawn from British and French military intellectuals of the 60s and 70s and enhanced by modern social science and the bitter experience of Iraq and Afghanistan. It is, as Zenpundit noted, a purely operational doctrine and has never pretended otherwise.

The fact that counterinsurgency become so celebrated is a commentary on the American love of technocratic solutions and innovations and the problems we face in creating and implementing abstract and complex long-term visions. The American narrative is one of progressive innovation and triumph over adversity. This is a helpful narrative and we should celebrate our talent for innovation. But Zenpundit rightly argues that operational innovation isn’t enough.

Reflecting on this point further, I believe counter-insurgency does have an important grand strategic component: it has broadened the range of whims that American grand strategy can choose to pursue. COIN has reopened  the possibility of successfully remaking other societies in America’s image through the application of military force.

This is not to say this possibility is very large. It isn’t. However, the common interpretation of Vietnam seemed to completely foreclose the possibility of overseas social engineering. Now there is a counter-example in post-surge Iraq, however slight and however temporary. The Wilsonian urge, deeply embedded in both major political parties in the post-Cold War era, even after the at best mixed results of the Iraqi and Afghan experience, is still there. The urge to remake the world in America’s image, an expression of the love of cleanly engineered solutions that A.E. refers to and the incredible bewilderment that Americans have at the ability of other political communities to run along clean, elegant American lines, lurks in the heart of the American establishment. It wasn’t completely quashed by Vietnam, it survived Lebanon and Somalia, and it will probably survive Iraq and Afghanistan.

A problem with the various schools of realism in international relations is that they underestimate the potency of creative forces in history. An Roman or Persian realist  in the early centuries of the Christian Era would have measured the range of possibility in international relations by which empire possessed a few towns in Syria and northern Mesopotamia or who held the protectorate over Armenia at any given moment. Nine out of ten times, they’d be right. However, a black swan would appear out of the desert and change the world beyond the imagination of any Roman or Persian realist.

While the realist is correct that human nature is a constant, that ultimately the world is tragic, and that man is inevitably bound, spread-eagled, to the Thucydidian trinity of fear, honor, and interest, at times change erupts in bursts of disruptive change that punctuate the equilibrium and change the scenery beyond recognition. Realism is more a reversion to the general mean of history than the constant drumbeat of human existence. While most of the time people live a life of Thucydides, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, sometimes they live a life of Herodotus, where great people do great things that actually change history. Every Sicilian Expedition has its Marathon.

I was also struck by this observation:

Ultimately a grand strategy is a shared vision that originates from a dream of a nation’s place in the world–and a nation’s vision of itself. Yet few are looking at identity as a source of strategy. We should expend more energy conducting this kind of analysis instead of purely geopolitical or threat-based analysis.

I wonder which comes first, the grand strategy or national identity? Hamilton’s grand strategy, the American System, is a good example. Hamilton was not a great politician. He also had a lousy read on American culture. Hamilton seems to have had a certain contempt for the American public and its elected officials and it’s probably a good thing for the health of the Republic that he never got in a position where he could absolutely dictate policy. That being said, he managed to get enough of his program into place that it continued strongly for another 150 years, powering America to heights he barely conceived of.

Yet much of this grand strategy, which we should call the eternal grand strategy, since it didn’t originate with Hamilton or even Sir Robert Walpole but extended back to the seventeenth century, was directly opposed to powerful currents of American culture. American Revolutionary thinkers objected to many of the features of contemporary Britain. Stock-jobbers, the Bank of England, monopolies, navigation acts, and other outrages that corrupted the virtue of the people were just the sort of thing we kicked the Hanoverians out of the country for. And Hamilton wanted to reintroduce them. What Hamilton needed was a Trojan horse, someone who tasted American that the American people would follow, someone who would easily trade principle for the power that Hamilton offered. Hamilton needed Thomas Jefferson.

After Albert Gallatin, the Jefferson creature that most resembled Hamilton, explained the Hamilton program to Jefferson, Jefferson proceeded to slice a few egregious parts of it off, like large parts of the navy, and kept the essentials in place. As the crisis of the Napoleonic Wars made a mockery of High Jeffersonism, Jefferson and his minions Madison and Monroe grew to embrace more and more of the program. After beating the Virginia Dynasty, the American System ran into Jackson but survived even that and emerged victorious in the War Between the States.

Greater New England grew to love Hamilton while Southerners always hated his legacy. Greater New England outbred the South though so it won in the end. Hamilton’s system became as American apple pie. It became an example of a grand strategy that proceeded identity rather than being shaped. In fact, grand strategy adapted American national identity or at least certain strands of it to its own ends.

Culture, like politics, is a struggle. In fact, politics is the instrument that culture uses to fight the good fight. Identity is a byproduct of this cultural sausage making: the bits of ejecta that go into it will come from many different bodies, be stuffed into a stray piece of gut, and sold as a single piece of meat. If identity is relatively constant, such as in old nations like France or Japan, the end result of the cultural struggle will be fairly cohesive. Where it is relatively fragile and shifting, such as in the United States, the result of the sausage making process is liable to be confused.

Confusion is likely to be the end result of any American attempt to create an American grand strategy. A grand strategy that seeks to draw from American national identity is likely to be equally confused. A confused culture leads to confused politics. Confused politics leads to confused strategy. It may be that someone who has no clue about American national identity, someone like Hamilton who has no clue what makes America tick, may have a better chance at forming a working grand strategy than someone inside looking out. It may work so well that in the end we’ll describe it as quintessentially America.

Zenpundit writes an excellent post (The Kilcullen Doctrine) which is followed by an excellent response (New Doctrines Without Strategic Foundations) from Galhran over at Information Dissemination. Zen argues that Lt. Col. John Nagl (ret) has distilled the insights of COIN expert Dr. David Kilcullen’s new book The Accidental Guerrilla into a “digestible set of memes sized exactly right for the journalistic and governmental elite whose eyes glaze over at the mention of military jargon and who approach national security from a distinctly civilian and political perspective”. Nagl’s compressed version goes something like this:

….In direct opposition to the ideas that drove American intervention policy two decades ago, Kilcullen suggests ‘the anti -Powell doctrine’ for counter-insurgency campaigns.

• First, planners should select the lightest, most indirect and least intrusive form of intervention that will achieve the necessary effect.
• Second, policy-makers should work by, with, and through partnerships with local government administrators, civil society leaders, and local security forces whenever possible.
• Third, whenever possible, civilian agencies are preferable to military intervention forces, local nationals to international forces, and long-term, low-profile engagement to short-term, high-profile intervention.

Zen correctly criticizes this “doctrine” on three grounds:

1. “Kilcullen’s three principles are an operational and not a genuinely strategic doctrine.”
2. “[T]his operational doctrine requires a sound national strategy and grand strategy if it is to add real value and not merely be a national security fire extinguisher.”

Gahlran picks up these two threads and runs with it:

…I am beginning to wonder where [COIN] becomes a priority towards national security, and how we get to the point this becomes national security as opposed to imperialism. Understanding a culture in COIN is a means by which we implement cultural influence, and potentially force cultural adaptation. Toward what strategic national objective in national security do we participate in this doctrine?

I ask this question because Zenpundit is on to something when he calls this “The Kilcullen Doctrine.” I think there is enormous potential here for positive and effective results, I’m just not sure I see the answer to the “why” question though…

If policy drives strategy, and strategy drives operational doctrine, shouldn’t we all be a bit concerned that operational doctrine has become the policy talking point rather than a policy itself?

With all the intellectual energy being expended on COIN doctrine, we are certainly becoming experts on how to apply counterinsurgency to our military occupations absent a clearly stated objective for the military occupation. What is missing in the open source is the intellectual energy being expended on the “why”, which is what would normally constitute the political policy of a country exercising military power in the context of a grand strategy.

I see two things missing from the national security debate…

1. A clear national political policy for any of the national security debates today…
2. A clear grand strategy for any of the foreign policy and national security debates today, whether it is the QDR, budget cuts, or operations being conducted globally…Ends are not well defined and means are being predetermined by budget decisions, and every major public discussion I see focuses on doctrine, education, and training (ways!) leaving strategy an upside down triangle in the context of a global economic crisis. We are missing a solid political and strategic foundation as a nation, and find ourselves literally teetering on the point and with a clear lack of symmetry…

With the focus on doctrine, in the end we are building the military for managing the problems that result from a lack of coherent policy and an alignment of strategy to policy. What is it we are trying to achieve with our liberal use of military power in the 21st century? This is not a complicated question, but an answer is a mandatory requirement to avoid the perpetual long war scenario. Did anyone in the Obama policy office ever read Clausewitz? Ironically, the Bush administration knew what political objectives they wanted from the use of military power, they just had no idea how to do it. How [do the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars] end when our national strategy has no end derived by a political objective expressed as policy?

Short answer: it doesn’t. Until this country has a public debate on the reason “why” we fight, the discussion will continue to be “how” we fight, meaning doctrine on the “ways” and an industrial driven discussion on what “means” will be purchased to fight will substitute for the public discussion of strategy as a way to avoid articulating a political policy, and in the meantime our military forces are being utilized globally absent a clearly articulated objective.

I wonder if asking for a grand strategy is asking too much from the American system of government. There have been few epochal grand strategic thinkers in American history: Hamilton, Wilson, Kennan, perhaps Jackson, Mahan, FDR, or Kissenger. Hamilton was the greatest of all. Talleyrand, himself an epochal figure whose grand strategy of legitimism ruled Europe from 1814-1914, once wrote, “I consider Napoleon, Fox, and Hamilton the three greatest men of our epoch, and if I were forced to decide between the three, I would give without hesitation the first place to Hamilton”. Hamilton adopted a system outlined in three of the greatest grand strategic documents ever written (First Report on Public Credit, Second Report on Public Credit, Report on Manufactures) that was so potent that even his Jeffersonian opponents adopted it whole hog by 1815 and followed it, excepting a Jacksonian interlude between 1830-1861, with stunning success until 1945. The first grand strategic dilemma that the Hamiltonian grand strategy encountered was the spectacular and sudden elevation of American power during World War I. America went from playing the role of challenger and spoiler to the role of nascent hegemon. This was beyond even Hamilton’s seemingly premature and grandiose predictions of future American greatness:

I shall briefly observe, that our situation invites, and our interests prompt us, to aim at an ascendant in the system of American affairs. The world may politically, as well as geographically, be divided into four parts, each having a distinct set of interests. Unhappily for the other three, Europe by her arms and by her negociations, by force and by fraud, has, in different degrees, extended her dominion over them all. Africa, Asia, and America have successively felt her domination. The superiority, she has long maintained, has tempted her to plume herself as the Mistress of the World, and to consider the rest of mankind as created for her benefit. Men admired as profound philosophers have, in direct terms, attributed to her inhabitants a physical superiority; and have gravely asserted that all animals, and with them the human species, degenerate in America–that even dogs cease to bark after having breathed a while in our atmosphere. Facts have too long supported these arrogant pretensions of the European. It belongs to us to vindicate the honor of the human race, and to teach that assuming brother moderation. Union will enable us to do it. Disunion will add another victim to his triumphs. Let Americans disdain to be the instruments of European greatness! Let the thirteen States, bound together in a strict and indissoluble union, concur in erecting one great American system, superior to the controul of all trans-atlantic force or influence, and able to dictate the terms of the connection between the old and the new world!

Into this breach came a cold Scotsman with a distinct air of personal superiority, that rarest and most dangerous of all creatures, the working political scientist. Thomas Woodrow Wilson saw a world order previously made up of centuries old empires and pronounced a cure in search of a disease: democracy based on the principle of the self-determination of nationalities. Wilson ripped down the old and tried in favor of the new and untested. Wilson planned to bring the principles behind John Calhoun’s vision of a United States with the League of Nations playing the role of the weak Federal Government, the nations of the Earth playing the role of the super-empowered States, and national sovereignty playing the role of nullification. It could be said that the millions that died in the upheavals unleashed by self-determination’s war of all against all, like the Confederacy of the Old South, “died of State’s Rights”. Wilson implicitly desired a world much like the then contemporary New World: a world of dysfunctional republics under the tutelage of a ruthless otherworldly Princeton school master who would “teach the South American world’s republics to elect good men”.

Wilson’s grand strategy was crippled by a few inconvenient truths:

1. America lacked substantial experience, institutions, or personnel appropriate for carrying out a grand strategy of global engagement, intervention, or hegemony at any scale.
2. America lacked a sizable constituency for such a grand strategy.
3. Many Americans, rightly, feared that such a strategy would corrupt the Old Republic and bring the evils of the Old World, with it’s feuding powers, to the New.
4. America was unwilling to invest in the resources, primarily military, that would be necessary for carrying out such a strategy.

Even if Wilsonism didn’t have the answer America was looking for in 1919, the fundamental fact on the ground remained. The Hamiltonian grand strategy had made the United States the most powerful nation on Earth and, due perhaps to a persistent lack of imagination, America only had two grand strategies to choose from:

1. Seek World Americanization, a global revolution that would create America all over the world.
2. Continue the policy of “America in One Country” advocated by Hamiltonians.

America has vacillated between these two Grand Strategies ever since. In practice, the grand strategy of the United States has been to replicate the Western Hemisphere all over the globe, with America as the prima inter pares amongst a group of weak, territorially stable, and easily manipulated (possibly only nominal) republics. This grand strategy was almost implicit under FDR’s policy of the Four Policemen, with Great Britain, the USSR, and (nominally) China playing the role the United States played in the Western Hemisphere in their respective regions and the United States acting as friendly arbiter between them all. This didn’t solve the schizophrenia between the two strategies but allowed the US to limp along. An even more fortuitous occurrence was the rise of enemies like Nazi Germany, Mikadoist Japan, and Communist Russia to provide a focal point for American power in the place of a hard and definitive resolution of the underlying dichotomy. Containment provided a useful framework to ignore the schizophrenia. In the name of defense and often on an ad hoc basis as new crises arose, America began to develop an informal imperialism that involved it in every nook and cranny in the world and made it the target of every crackpot with a gripe on the planet. However, with the inconvenient passing of the USSR, once again America is forced to wrestle with the unresolved dilemma of its own power and its inability to figure out how to use it.

The fundamental assumption that American grand strategy, such as it is, is that the world is made up of nations. This, after all, was the state of Europe during the infancy of the republic and it became the state of America’s immediate neighbors after they won their independence from Spain and Portugal. Where the United States found “non-state” actors, it treated them as nations, signed treaties with them as nations, went to war with them as nations, and moved them to inhospitable parts of the North American continent as nations. There was a solution to parts of the world that lacked substantial nations and that solution was empire. The vast stretches of the world that were subject to tribes and clans were absorbed into empires during the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The answer to the tribal problem was the Maxim Gun: Europeans had it and the tribes didn’t.

The United States under Wilson, having a romantic view of its own independence struggle and derivative struggles launched by its Latin neighbors, determined that the entire world should repeat its national experience. One by one the empires of the Earth were replaced with the thin gruel of national self-determination where no nations existed and the democratic aspiration where no democracy existed. The result has been, in many parts of the world, persistent disorder and war. This isn’t to justify the existence of these empires but only to observe that while America is good at destroying the old order of things, it is very poor at providing a new order in its place. This is the true human cost of American grand strategic schizophrenia.

If we’re looking for a rationale behind the Kilcullen Doctrine, perhaps this would suffice. America expects a world of nations. In many parts of the world, there are no nations. America’s grand strategy should be to make a world of nations. This means that grand strategy should aim to establish a global dictatorship of law. Any law will do, as long as it keeps a nation’s citizen out of other nations’ hair. The maximal expression of this grand strategy can be American soldiers going into every nook and cranny of the ungoverned world and using COIN-fu to magically subject the riotous locals to the power of law or it could be the global minimum of collectively punishing a group of tribesmen who don’t think of themselves as a nation as if they were a nation. It certainly encouraged the indigenous inhabitants of this continent to develop a sense of nationhood.

One of the important principles of the original stratum of common law was that every man should have a lord. This served the important role of clearly establishing who was responsible for a wayward subject. A similar principle for the 21st century is that every man should have a nation. The primary goal of this principle is to establish where the final responsibility for an errant citizen lies. A clear bright line can then be drawn from an offender back to the offender’s keeper and recompense can be extracted from them. It has the virtue of providing a minimal bridge between the two possible grand strategies while something else turns up. However, in the ungoverned spaces, such a policy would inevitably rub the locals the wrong way. In herding cats there’s nothing like stroking them backwards. That, in the end, can only lead to more accidental guerrillas. It may be, however, that those covered with Hamilton’s fingerprints will inevitably have more power to accidentally throw around than is desirable.

The winner’s dilemma.

Risen from the Grave?

There are nine possible rings of defense around the United States of America.

This assumes that the United States continues to roughly correspond territorially to its current territorial limits. That itself is a big assumption. The United States could, more rapidly than most would dare contemplate, fracture due to internal strains. This is a more likely threat than conquest from the outside, given the difficulties faced with moving large numbers of troops from Eurasia to the Americas.

• The United States could fragment into multiple United Stateses, each seeking the legitimacy of the original and fighting over the symbolic trappings that signify that legitimacy (e.g. we have the original parchment of the Constitution!).
• The United States could fragment into a smaller rump United States and an assortment of powerful regional states.
• The United States could fragment into regions, city states, or even individual states.

Any such scenario would re-open the North American continent to Eurasian intrigue, an outcome that was largely foreclosed by the forcible reunification of the United States in 1865 followed by the expulsion of the French from Mexico two years later. The United States would be haunted by the Mandate of Heaven: the ambition beating in the heart of every local president or governor of each fissaparous Unionlet would be to recreate Greater America. American nationalism would invert and become more like the nationalism of contemporary Russia and China, a negative nationalism, the nationalism of victimhood. Instead of its focus on an expanding future, America would turn around and focus on regaining a receding past. The casual cosmopolitan would be thrown to the side while the theme of American culture would become nashi “ours”. This flavor of American nationalism was last seen, to a minor extent, from the end of the Vietnam War to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

America, if it recovered from its travails, would become a revisionist power. This role would be conceptually easier than the United States’ current strategic configuration. The role of the challenger is well established: many contemporary powers are playing the role right now.

Each ring represents a level of control. To quote Admiral J.C. Wylie:

The primary aim of the strategist in the conduct of war is some selected degree of control of the enemy for the strategist’s own purpose; this is achieved by control of the pattern of war; and this control of the pattern of war is had by manipulation of the center of gravity of war to the advantage of the strategist and the disadvantage of the opponent.

The successful strategist is the one who controls the nature and the placement and the timing and the weight of the centers of gravity of war, and who exploits the resulting control of the pattern of war toward his own ends.

There are a few principles under which control operates in the real world:

1. Control has several dimensions e.g. land, naval, space, air, social, cyberspace.
2. Each dimension of control is both a target of control and a medium through which control can be transferred to other targets of control.
3. Each dimension of control has two characteristics: resistance, how well it acts as a medium of control, and persistence, how long a target of control can be kept under control.
4. Some dimensions of control, offering little resistance, make better media of control than others. However, they are often hostile to persistent control. This means that they function more as media of control than as targets of control.
5. Control grows more rapidly through control of a dimension of control characterized by low resistance than a dimension of control characterized by high persistence.

There are three levels of control over a dimension of control (level 0 is no control at all):

1. Sufficient control to gain knowledge about a dimension of control.
2. Sufficient control to shape control over a dimension of control.
3. Complete control of a dimension of control.

There are six sub-levels of control, three negative and three positive. The negative and defensive sub-levels are:

1. Prevent others from getting knowledge you don’t want them to have.
2. Prevent others from shaping your level of control.
3. Prevent others from absolutely controlling you.

The positive and offensive sub-levels are:

1. Get knowledge about others, especially the knowledge the others don’t want you to have.
2. Shape others’ level of control.
3. Absolutely control others.

Ring 0 is the level the United States would have to fall below to grant another a sufficient level of control to dismember significantly the present fifty constituent states of the Union. Having noted some of the possible characteristics of Ring 0 previously, let’s move on to the nine rings proper.

Ring 1:

• Coastal defense of the west coast of North America, the Atlantic seaboard, the Great Lakes, and the northern Caribbean Sea.
• Submarines for commerce raiding and for launching nuclear armed ICBMs.
• Air power able to project to Northern Eurasia, mid-Pacific, northern South America, and mid-Atlantic with air superiority over North America.
• Land-based nuclear armed ICBMs capable of hitting Eurasia.
• Army concentrations in Minnesota, Washington State, Southern California, mid-Texas, Michigan, upper New York, and upper New England.
• Access to cyberspace.
• Access to space for missiles.
• Encouragement of amenable regimes in Canada and Mexico. If not amenable, work to change.

Ring 2:

• Forward naval defense of the west coast of North America, the Atlantic seaboard, and the Caribbean Sea.
• Coastal defense of Ring 1.
• Submarines for commerce raiding and for launching nuclear armed ICBMs.
• Air power able to project into Central Eurasia, western Pacific, central South America, and Atlantic Rimlands with air superiority over northeastern Pacific, Arctic, and north Atlantic.
• Land-based nuclear armed ICBMs capable of hitting Eurasia.
• Army concentrations along borders with central reserves in New York State, Illinois, Texas, Minnesota, Southern California, and Washington State.
• Access to cyberspace.
• Access to space for missiles.
• Encouragement of amenable regimes in Ring 1, northern Caribbean and nearby Atlantic islands. If not amenable, consider occupation of Canada, northern Mexico, Caribbean islands like Cuba, and Atlantic islands like the Bahamas and Bermuda.

Ring 3:

• Forward naval defense from Hawaii and Alaska into western to central Pacific and, in case of anthropogenic global warming (AGW), into the Arctic; and from east coast into North Atlantic islands and northern South America.
• Coastal defense of Ring 1.
• Submarines for commerce raiding and for launching nuclear armed ICBMs.
• Air power able to project into non-Heartland Eurasia and Africa with air superiority over Pacific Ocean, Arctic Ocean, and Atlantic Rimlands.
• Land-based nuclear armed ICBMs capable of hitting Eurasia.
• Army concentration in Ring 2 plus ability to occupy neighboring continental territory, nearby offshore islands, and raid Central and South America.
• Access to cyberspace with limited offensive capacity.
• Access to space for missiles and satellites.
• Encouragement of amenable regimes in Ring 2, Panama, and Iceland. If not amenable, consider occupation of Ring 1, Ring 2, Panama, and Iceland.

Ring 4:

• Forward defense in western Pacific with force projection into offshore islands like Formosa, the Philippines, and Japan and ability to project force into Atlantic Rimlands and, in case of anthropogenic global warming (AGW), into the Arctic facing Eurasian Rimlands.
• Coastal defense of Ring 1, Hawaii, and Alaska plus any necessary portions of Ring 1-3.
• Submarines for commerce raiding and for launching nuclear armed ICBMs.
• Air power able to project into Heartland Eurasia and Africa with air superiority over Western Hemisphere  to the Eurasian Rimlands.
• Land-based nuclear armed ICBMs capable of hitting Eurasia.
• Army concentrations in Ring 3 with ability to occupy countries in the Western Hemisphere and the ability to raid Eurasian Rimlands along Atlantic and Pacific.
• Access to cyberspace with limited cyber offensive capability.
• Access to space for missiles and satellites.
• Encouragement of amenable regimes in the Ring 3, the British Isles, Western Europe, Central America, Guam, Japan, Formosa, the Philippines, and Mexico. If not amenable, consider occupation of Ring 3, the Philippines, and Ireland.

Ring 5:

• Naval force projection into East Eurasian Rimlands from lodgments in East Eurasian islands like Japan, Formosa, and the Philippines; force projection into west Eurasian Rimlands from lodgments on offshore islands like Great Britain, and the ability to raid into the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean Sea, and, in case of anthropogenic global warming (AGW), to project power into the previously inaccessible North Eurasian Rimland.
• Coastal defense of Ring 3.
• Submarines for commerce raiding and for launching nuclear armed ICBMs.
• Air power able to project into Heartland Eurasia and Africa on raids with air superiority over Eurasian Pacific and Atlantic Rimlands.
• Land-based nuclear armed ICBMs capable of hitting Eurasia.
• Army concentrations in Ring 4 plus the ability to occupy islands immediately off the coast of Eurasia and the ability to raid Indian Ocean and Mediterranean Rimlands.
• Access to cyberspace with with medium cyber offensive capability.
• Access to space for missiles and satellites with limited space offensive capacity.
• Encouragement of amenable regimes in the Ring 4, British Isles, Western Eurasia, East Eurasia, Korea, Japan, Formosa, Indonesia, and Southeast Asia. If not amenable, consider occupation of Ring 4, Japan, Great Britain, and Formosa.

Ring 6:

• Naval mastery of Atlantic and Pacific and the ability to raid into the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean Sea, and, in case of anthropogenic global warming (AGW), to project power into the previously inaccessible North Eurasian Rimland.
• Coastal defense of Ring 3.
• Submarines for commerce raiding and for launching nuclear armed ICBMs.
• Air power able to project anywhere on Earth with air superiority over everywhere except the very inner recesses of the Heartland.
• Land-based nuclear armed ICBMs capable of hitting Eurasia.
• Army concentrations in Ring 5 plus the ability to occupy Atlantic and Eurasian Rimland and the ability to raid Indian Ocean and Mediterranean Rimlands.
• Access to cyberspace with major cyber offensive capability.
• Access to space for missiles and satellites with limited space offensive capacity.
• Encouragement of amenable regimes in Ring 5, South Eurasia, Southern Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. If not amenable, consider occupation of Ring 5, Borneo, Sumatra, Korea, Atlantic Eurasian Rimland, and Southern Africa.

Ring 7:

• Naval mastery of all the world’s oceans.
• Coastal defense of Ring 4.
• Submarines for commerce raiding and for launching nuclear armed ICBMs.
• Air power able to project anywhere on Earth with air superiority everywhere.
• Land-based nuclear armed ICBMs capable of hitting Eurasia.
• Army concentrations in Ring 6 plus the ability to occupy Mediterranean and South Asian Rimland.
• Access to cyberspace with major cyber offensive capability.
• Access to space for missiles and satellites with major space offensive capacity.
• Encouragement of amenable regimes in Ring 6 and South Eurasian Rimlands. If not amenable, consider occupation of Ring 6 and South Eurasian Rimlands.

Ring 8:

• Naval mastery of all the world’s oceans.
• Coastal defense of Ring 5.
• Submarines for commerce raiding and for launching nuclear armed ICBMs.
• Air power able to project anywhere on Earth with air superiority everywhere.
• Land-based nuclear armed ICBMs capable of hitting Eurasia.
• Army concentrations in Ring 7 plus the ability to occupy the outer Heartland.
• Mastery of cyberspace.
• Mastery of space.
• Encouragement of amenable regimes in Ring 7 and Heartland. If not amenable, consider occupation of Ring 7 and Heartland.

Ring 9:

• Naval mastery of all the world’s oceans.
• Coastal defense everywhere.
• Submarines for commerce raiding and for launching nuclear armed ICBMs.
• Air power able to project anywhere on Earth with air superiority everywhere.
• Land-based nuclear armed ICBMs capable of hitting Eurasia.
• Army concentrations in Heartland.
• Mastery of cyberspace.
• Mastery of space.
• Mastery of land.